“Just like the Perimeter! It never rains but it pours,” declared the Major. “Now, I’m going to take you four back to the reserve line road and we’ll try the phone there. Francis, follow to the transport rendezvous as fast as you can.”

He paused and added, “I don’t suppose you know where this Hedge is going, if they’ve got across the Perimeter?”

“Forwin Mill, where there is something called a Lightning Farm that they will use to free the Destroyer,” said Lirael. “They may have no difficulty getting across the Perimeter. Hedge has the Chief Minister’s nephew with him, Nicholas Sayre, and they’re being met by someone who has a letter from the Chief Minister allowing them to bring the hemispheres in.”

“That wouldn’t be sufficient,” declared the Major. “I suppose it might work at the Crossing Point, but there’d be hours of to and fro with Garrison at Bain and even Corvere. No one in their right mind would fall for it on the real Perimeter. They’ll have to fight their way through, though if an alert was sounded an hour ago, they probably already have. Orderly!”

A corporal, a burning cigarette disguised in one cupped hand, poked his head into the dugout entrance.

“Get me a map that covers Forwin Mill, somewhere west of here! I’ve never heard of the bloody place.”

“It’s about thirty miles down the coast from here, sir,” volunteered Tindall, stopping in mid rush for the exit. “I’ve been fishing there – there’s a loch with quite good salmon. It is a few miles outside the Perimeter Zone, sir.”

“Is it? Humph!” remarked Greene, his face once again turning a deeper shade of red. “What else is there?”

“There was an abandoned sawmill, a broken-down dock, and what’s left of the railway they once used to bring the trees down from the hills,” said Tindall. “I don’t know what this Lightning Farm might be, but there is—”

“Nicholas had the Lightning Farm built there,” interrupted Lirael. “Quite recently, I think.”

“Any people about the place?” asked the Major.

“There are now,” replied Lieutenant Tindall. “Two Southerling refugee camps were built there late last year. Norris and Erimton they’re called, in the hills immediately above the loch valley. There might be fifty thousand refugees there, I suppose, under police guard.”

“If the Destroyer is made whole, they will be among the first to die,” said the Dog. “And Hedge will reap their spirits as they cross into Death, and they will serve him.”

“We’ll have to get them out of there, then,” said the Major. “Though being outside the Perimeter makes it difficult for us to do anything. General Tindall will understand. I only hope General Kingswold has gone home. He’s an Our Country supporter through and through—”

“We must hurry!” Lirael suddenly interrupted. There was no time for more talk. A terrible sense of foreboding gripped her, as if every second they spent here was a grain of sand lost from a nearly empty hourglass. “We have to get to Forwin Mill before Hedge and the hemispheres!”

“Right!” shouted Major Greene, suddenly energised again. He seemed to need spurring along every now and then. He snatched up his helmet, threw it on his head and snagged his revolver by the lanyard with the return motion. “Carry on, Mister Tindall. Quickly now!”

Everything did happen very quickly then. Lieutenant Tindall disappeared into the night and the Major led them at a trot down another communications trench. Eventually it rose out of the ground and became a simple track, identified every few yards with a white-painted rock that shone faintly in the starlight. There was no moon, though one had risen on the Old Kingdom side, and it was much colder here.

Twenty minutes later, the wheezing – but surprisingly fit – Major slowed to a walk and the track joined a wide asphalt road that stretched as far as they could see by starlight, due east and west. Telephone poles lined the road, part of the network that connected the full length of the Perimeter.

A low, concrete blockhouse brooded on the other side of the road, fed from the telegraph poles with a spaghetti-like pile of telephone wires.

Major Greene led the way inside like some corpulent missile, shouting to wake the unfortunate soldier who was slumped over a switchboard desk, his head nestled in a web of lines and plugs.

“Get me Perimeter HQ!” ordered the Major. The semiconscious soldier obeyed him, plugging in lines with the dumb expertise of the highly trained. “General Tindall in person! Wake him up if necessary!”

“Yes sir, yes, sir, yes,” mumbled the telephone orderly, wishing that he had chosen a different night to drink his secret hoard of rum. He kept one hand over his mouth to try to keep the smell from the ferocious Major and his strange companions.

When the call went through, Greene grabbed the handset and spoke quickly. Obviously he was talking to various unhelpful in-between people, because his face kept getting redder and redder, till Lirael thought his skin would set his moustache on fire. Finally he reached someone who he listened to for a minute, without interruption. Then he slowly put the handset back in its cradle.

“There is an incursion happening at the western end of the Perimeter right now,” he said. “There were reports of red distress rockets, but we’ve lost communication from Mile One to Mile Nine, so it’s a broad attack. No one knows what’s going on. General Tindall has already ordered out a flying column, but apparently he’s gone to some other trouble at the Crossing Point. The shiny-bum staff colonel on the other end has ordered me to stay here.”

“Stay here! Can’t we go west and try and stop Hedge at the Wall?” asked Lirael.

“We lost communication an hour ago,” said Major Greene. “It hasn’t been re-established. No more rockets have been seen. That means there is no one left alive to fire any. Or else they’ve run away. In either case, your Hedge and his hemispheres will already be over the Wall and past the Perimeter.”

“I don’t understand how they could have caught up with us,” said Lirael.

“Time plays tricks between here and home,” said Mogget sepulchrally, frightening the life out of the telephone operator. The little cat jumped out of Sam’s pack, ignored the soldier and added, “Though I expect it will be slow going, dragging the hemispheres to this Forwin Mill. We may have time to get there first.”

“I’d better get in touch with my parents,” said Sam. “Can you patch into the civilian telephone system?”

“Ah,” said the Major. He rubbed his nose and seemed unsure of what he was going to say. “I thought you would have known. It happened almost a week ago...”

“What?”

“I’m sorry, son,” said the Major. He braced himself to attention and said, “Your parents are dead. They were murdered in Corvere by Corolini’s radicals. A bomb. Their car was totally destroyed.”

Sam listened blank faced to the Major’s words. Then he slid down the wall and put his head in his hands.

Lirael touched Sam’s left shoulder, and the Dog rested her nose on his right. Only Mogget seemed unaffected by the news. He sat next to the switchboard operator, his green eyes sparkling.

Lirael spent the next few seconds walling off the news, pushing it down to where she had always pushed her distress, somewhere that allowed her to keep on going. If she lived, she would weep for the sister she had never known, as she would weep for Touchstone, and her mother, and so many other things that had gone wrong in the world. But now there was no time for weeping, since many other sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers and others depended on them doing what must be done.

“Don’t think about it,” said Lirael, squeezing Sam’s shoulder. “It’s up to us now. We have to get to Forwin Mill before Hedge does!”

“We can’t,” said Sam. “We might as well give up—”

He stopped himself in mid sentence, let his hands fall from his face and stood up, but hunched over as if there were a pain in his gut. He stood there silently for almost a minute. Then he took the feather-coin out of his sleeve and flipped it. It spun up to the ceiling of the blockhouse and hung there. Sam leant against the wall to watch it, his body still crooked but his head craned back.